


In Between

by myth_taken



Series: Can't Believe It's Not Canon [3]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Dreams, Dreamsharing, F/F, Implied Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-05
Updated: 2016-12-05
Packaged: 2018-09-06 14:35:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8756398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myth_taken/pseuds/myth_taken
Summary: They walk together in the dreams, the space between life and death.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Fair warning: the ship here is only subtext.

They walk together in the dreams, the space between life and death, between alert and limp. Between being the Slayer and being the slain. 

The first time it happens, they haven’t met yet. Buffy is just a girl, walking into Faith’s dreams, and when Faith wakes up, she can feel something new coursing through her veins. When she hits snooze, the clock becomes rubble, and Faith rolls over. She knew this day would come.

Every night, now, she has this girl in her dreams, just standing, watching her, and after a while, she starts watching back. The two step closer and closer to each other, but Faith always wakes up just before their hands touch.

Until one day, Faith packs up and hitchhikes across the country. Her Watcher is dead, and there’s an apocalypse in Sunnydale, California. 

Anything to get her away from Boston. There are only nightmares in Boston; Sunnydale sounds like the place of her dreams. 

On the road, her dreams are tangled. She sees the girl again, but now she’s fighting a vampire, and so is the girl, and then they both stake their vampires and immediately rush to fight each other. Faith spends her days leaning against the windows of strangers’ cars, trying to figure out why her subconscious has given her such a constant companion. She’s heard before that every face in a dream is a face the dreamer has seen before, but she doesn’t quite buy it. This girl’s never been to Boston; it’s obvious. Her hair is too blonde, and her skin is too obviously a result of the sun. 

When Faith arrives in Sunnydale and sees the girl in a club, she pinches herself to make sure she’s not dreaming again. When it’s clear she’s not, she sneaks a glance at the girl again, and suddenly she sees the way the girl moves, even when she’s just turning her head to talk to her friends, or lifting her cup to drink out of it, and she knows: this is the other Slayer. Buffy. The girl who died so that Faith might feel alive.  

Faith files it away in her brain. She can’t walk up to Buffy now and introduce herself, and she knows Buffy will notice her eventually. At the very least, she’ll wonder why the vampires are getting dusted twice as often.

As it turns out, Faith doesn’t have long to wait. She meets Buffy and her friends just outside the club.

That night, her dream is of the first day of kindergarten, but the entire class is the same age as Faith. Buffy is there, next to her, and this is the first time she speaks: “Weird day, huh?”

“I’ve had worse,” Faith answers.

Buffy never mentions the dreams when they’re awake. Maybe she doesn’t think Faith has them too; maybe she thinks they’re just another form of a prophetic dream. 

Faith knows better. There’s no recorded instance of two Slayers living at the same time, not counting when the one before Faith was Called, but it would make sense for them to share dreams. Both she and Buffy draw from the same mystical power; presumably, their dreams are from a similar place. 

When Faith kills the mayor’s assistant, Buffy is in her dream, telling her, “You’ll have a hard time digging yourself out of this one.”

Faith, at the bottom of a grave, answers, “I wasn’t gonna.”

And when Faith loses face and runs to the mayor, looking for a job, she tries her hardest to close off her mind, lest Buffy use the dreams to learn what she’s up to, but it turns out that she doesn’t have to worry. The dreams are always in Buffy’s house, hanging tinsel on a Christmas tree together, cooking dinner, looking after a dog that the Summers family has never had… it’s all frighteningly domestic, and Faith wonders if this is the Slayer subconscious trying to create the life that the Slayer conscious can never have. When she’s awake, she’s a hero or a villain, depending on the day and who you ask, but when she’s asleep, she’s just Faith, and Buffy is just Buffy, and they’re just two girls living their lives.

The coma is the worst. Faith is hurled back and forth between her own dreams and the ones she shares with Buffy. When she wakes up, she realizes that it’s because she can only dream with Buffy when Buffy is asleep, but in her coma, her consciousness is not equipped for that realization. She can only watch as her subconscious goes between death-filled nightmares and domestic life with Buffy.

Now, the dreams take place in Faith’s apartment, the one the Mayor gave her. She and Buffy move in together. They set up the PlayStation, they move in their clothes. They change the sheets.

Every dream ends with a knife in Faith’s gut and blood on both of their shirts.

When Faith wakes up, she wakes up  _ angry _ . Buffy put that knife in Faith’s gut. It’s her fault. 

The next time Faith dreams, it’s from a Los Angeles jail, and Buffy isn’t there. Not at first. It’s just Faith, in her jail cell, crying. And then, after some interminable amount of time, Buffy is there; she just  _ appears _ , wearing a white dress with some sort of glow around her, and she says, “Aren’t you glad you didn’t give up your chance at Heaven?”

Faith’s tears stop. She looks up. “I’ve never believed in Heaven,” she says. As always, it feels scripted, even though she had no way to script it. She opens her mouth, and the words are there, ready to be said.

Faith is in the jail for a long time. Her dreams with Buffy come less often as she starts to sleep more regularly; she almost prefers the nightmares. At least they’re straightforward, and she can work through fear. Fear is what’s kept her alive. Long-lasting connections with other people? Not so much.

Eventually, the dreams stop entirely. Faith assumes this is because Buffy’s sleep schedule has become so messed up that she and Faith are never asleep at the same time, or at least not long enough for a dream.

It’s only when she falls asleep one night and sees Buffy sitting on a grave, her hair matted and tangled, that she realizes the real reason. 

She manages to get through to Angel, demand why he didn’t tell her about Buffy, and the silence on the other end of the phone line is enough to confirm what she’d assumed: he’d forgotten. He apologized, of course; he went through a whole list of things that were going on in his life at the time. Demon dimension, new kid, Buffy dead, and so on. And somehow Faith had fallen out of the loop.

It was okay. She always had her dreams.

When she gets back to Sunnydale, she finally gets up the courage to ask Buffy about the dreams. She goes all the way up to Buffy’s room and everything just to ask.

“So, B. I’ve been getting these dreams. They’ve got you, me, and a weird-ass domestic life. You know what I’m sayin’?”

“Of course I know what you’re saying,” Buffy answers. She leans back against the headboard of her bed. “You can’t share a dream without someone to share with.”

“Ha! I thought so.” Faith grinned. “See, now I know I’m not crazy. You know, no one told me you were dead? I only figured it out when you came back, because the dreams came back.”

“I’m sorry.”

Faith shrugs. “I’m over it. Glad you’re alive, B.”

“Same to you,” Buffy tells her.

The weirdest thing is when all the Potentials get their promotion to Slayer at once. Suddenly, Faith’s dreams are crowded; on any given night, she might interact with five, six, seven different Slayers in different permutations. She sees Slayers who’ve never been to Sunnydale, and she sees Slayers who she sees every day in real life. 

Somehow, though, Buffy is always there, standing next to her, fielding questions, having cryptic conversations, and, oddly, holding Faith’s hand. Somehow, they are united in the face of hundreds of new Slayers. 

Of course, every so often, the dreams revert back to the old domestic life. Now they occur in Buffy’s apartment, or Faith’s, even when they live halfway across the world from each other. They change the sheets, they cook dinner, they move furniture. They are always together, even when they are apart.


End file.
